Siegfried, Rodelinda, Faust
6 January 2012 |
Posted by George Fleeton |
Siegfried, Rodelinda, Faust
Reviewed by
George Fleeton
The sixth season of the Met: Live in HD series opened on October 15 last in twelve cinemas across Ireland, including the Omniplex Dundonald in east Belfast.
In 2011, six of these live relays from New York were seen there, and this new year the remaining five are:
The Enchanted Island, January 21
Götterdämmerung, February 11 (same evening as The Magic Flute in Down Arts Centre)
Ernani, February 25
Manon, April 07 and
La Traviata, April 14 (centenary of the night the Titanic sank).
Such live high definition digital broadcasts as these are produced for the world market by Dubliner Robert Borchard-Young and his wife Julie, from their home in Brooklyn.
The Borchard-Young’s company is called BY Experience, and may be found at www.byexperience.net
Of those six earlier Met operas, I managed to catch four, the first of which, Anna Bolena, was reviewed on DownNews on October 25.
Having had to miss Don Giovanni and Satyagraha, I did see Siegfried (November 05, in Dún Laoghaire), then both Rodelinda (December 03) and Faust (December 10) in Dundonald.
The visit to Dún Laoghaire was interesting in that the manager of Irish Multiplex Cinemas there, Glenn Cooper, had laid on a small hospitality area for his 250 clients on the day, much appreciated since the opera lasted 5 hours and 20 minutes, including two extended intervals.
Siegfried
is the third part of Wagner’s massive Ring cycle, first performed in 1876 in Bayreuth, during the opening week of the new opera house which Wagner had had built there exclusively for the production of his operas.
This New York production was much less clumsy, flat-paced and dishwater-dull than the first two parts of the Ring (which had been seen earlier: Das Rheingold on October 09, 2010 and Die Walküre on May 14, 2011), both of which were reviewed on DownNews at that time.
Some of the set and costume details had evidently been re-designed to good effect for part 3, although the new fangled video imagery was distracting and unconvincing.
But what really saved this Siegfried from ridicule was a sterling performance by tenor Jay Hunter Morris, from Paris (Texas), the understudy called in at a week’s notice to replace heldentenor, or Wagner specialist, Gary Lehman, who was indisposed.
Dubliner and mezzo soprano Patricia Bardon again sang the small role of Erda, wise and all-seeing earth mother.
Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, clearly not at ease in this Ring cycle so far, cut a shallow figure with his Van Morrison hat and his old fashioned stand-and-shout attack on the role of the Wanderer.
Most disappointing of all was American soprano Deborah Voight, as Brünnhilde, yet in fairness to her who currently singing this difficult role today can cross the line in the sand drawn by Flagstad or Nilsson?
Wagner is not her comfort zone.
She strains.
Her Minnie in the last Met season’s production of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (seen on January 08, 2011) was a career highlight.
And in a fascinating segue from that, last summer at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in up-state New York, Voight was, by all reports, a superb Annie Oakley in Annie Get your Gun, the Irving Berlin musical from 1946, who is not a million miles from Puccini’s wild west.
As is usually the case, Renée Fleming, when she’s not singing herself, infectiously hosted this Siegfried performance back stage.
Rodelinda
Fleming was then on hand to sing the title role in an excellent production of Handel’s opera Rodelinda four weeks later.
First seen in London in 1725, the New York Met did not see its way to staging this work until seven years ago and so this was essentially a revival: same producer, conductor and soprano.
Rodelinda is relatively early Handel, written a year after what is perhaps Handel’s greatest opera, Giulio Cesare - which, by the way, is coming to the Grand Canal Theatre Dublin on March 14 and 16, at 7.00pm, in a new production by Opera North, Leeds.
Rodelinda was the Queen of Lombardy in the 7th century but Handel has it set in the early 18th.
The role of Bertarido, her usurped husband, was written for the castrato Senesino, and sung in this production by German countertenor Andreas Scholl.
But Fleming dominated.
Her feeling for the music of Handel is inspired and inspirational.
Now 53, she is at the peak of an amazing career, with one of the most versatile and resonant lyric soprano voices to be heard singing anywhere in opera today.
Combine that with a self-deprecating sense of humour, a lightness of touch in everything she does on stage or behind and a natural, radiant positiveness and you have an American national treasure.
All this was to the fore in this production of an opera which few of us know and which most of us will remember for a long time afterwards.
Faust
This, by comparison with Rodelinda, a week later, was not a pleasant experience: overblown, with appalling production values, it was irritatingly and tastelessly designed.
A great bass-baritone voice, René Pape, was wasted on a lowest-common-denominator characterisation of Mephistopheles.
Faust had opened the new opera house in New York in 1883 and has been performed there frequently in many different productions.
How this self-indulgent, disrespectful production got past the scrutiny of the head honchos at the Metropolitan Opera will probably remain a mystery.
But I believe that English National Opera had a big say, as co-producers – a curious partnership since the London Coliseum based company only performs in English.
Very great French operas are few and far between: Gounod’s Faust (1859) in one of them.
It builds on some very solid pre-Revolution foundations built by Lully and Rameau.
They made it possible for foreigners such as Gluck, Rossini and even Verdi to create a thirst and a taste for more indigenous opera in France, and the full flowering of that was opéra comique, grand opera (with ballet) and operetta throughout the 19th century.
Faust sprang from and back into that fertile ferment.
It belongs to a broad-based top dog family comprising Carmen, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Samson et Dalila, Lakmé, Werther and Pelléas et Mélisande.
Redeeming features of the production under review included
excellent interpretations of Faust and Marguerite as sung respectively by German tenor Jonas Kaufmann and Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya, and some strenuous but emotionally sensitive conducting by French-Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Finally, on another note, the live Radio broadcasts from the Met started on December 03 and continue for a straight run of twenty-three Saturday evenings until May 05.
In Northern Ireland these operas are relayed by BBC Radio 3 (92.3FM) usually at 6pm, and by RTĒ Lyric (95.2FM) always at 7pm, this being a delayed transmission.
Full details of future Metropolitan Operas and Bolshoi Ballets, to be beamed live in High Definition into Irish cinemas, are on www.classicalartsireland.com
George Fleeton
© mmxii
